Earlier this month at the Supercomputing 2007 conference, a team from Canada's University of Alberta used a 64-core, 144GB SGI(R) Altix(R) XE310 cluster to win the first-ever Cluster Challenge. In the SC07 Cluster Challenge, teams of undergraduate students assembled clusters on the SC07 exhibit floor and ran benchmarks and applications selected by industry and HPC veterans.

With the SGI Altix XE cluster, the Alberta team — which included a 16-year-old high school student — beat five other teams who ran the same set of computations on competing platforms. Alberta finished its computations for all Cluster Challenge applications in about 38 hours, some six hours before the official end of the competition.

"This was an exciting competition that showed the deep pool of talent from our team," said Paul Lu, associate professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and one of the coaches of the winning team(1). "The hard work and preparation of our team and its coaches paid off when the entire convention center lost power briefly on Tuesday. That forced us to completely restart the cluster and the computations. Fortunately, our Altix XE cluster was back up and running in about 10 minutes, which was not the case for all the other clusters. We were thrilled with the power and reliability of the SGI cluster."

Also at SC07, HPCwire, the leading source for global news and information covering the ecosystem of high productivity computing, announced that its readers had selected SGI Altix as the Most Innovative HPC Cluster Solution for 2007. The award follows the June introduction of SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE, an integrated blade platform purpose-built for HPC and a highly scalable, power- and space-efficient alternative to traditional "white box" clusters. They are designed to be up and running quickly, with some customers reporting that even large-scale deployments are operational in days, rather than weeks or months. Several new Altix ICE systems appear on the latest Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers; listed at No. 3 is a 14,336-core, 28TB SGI Altix ICE system acquired by state of New Mexico for the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

"As these latest achievements have shown, SGI Altix XE and Altix ICE clusters are causing people to rethink the notion of what cluster computing is all about," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI senior vice president and chief technology officer. "When we look back on SC07, we are pleased to congratulate the victorious Cluster Challenge team from the University of Alberta. At the same time, we offer our gratitude to the more than 100,000 readers of HPCwire for their recognition of our products and our people. Our goal is to keep innovating productively so that we will continue to be worthy of their votes."

HPCwire readers also honored Dr. Goh with an HPC Community Recognition Award. Dr. Goh is widely known throughout the industry for his insights into how next-generation computer systems must meet the application price/performance demands of customers. Dr. Goh's views are especially timely due to the recent shift away from a pervasive reliance on faster processor speeds to a focus on greater application scalability.

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